The Punisher will be brandishing an 18 certificate, but let's face it, it might as well come with a free bag of Jelly Tots. It's an electric video toy about a kid's comic strip, and little Johnny will get his copy when he's finished with that other Playstation game about the nice ambulance driver in San Andreas... Only when Mr. Flopsy is found strung up by his hole-punched ears, guts congealed on his cute white fluff and with little pink eyes crudely stapled shut will the possible consequences of impressionable mind-Punisher interaction become apparent.
But we wouldn’t go as far as to say that torture’s a bad thing, in this instance, almost ironically, torture is what saves it. Without torture The Punisher would be an entirely tawdry affair. You start off over here, and in a third person kind of way, you wander over there, killing everything in between with the handy cross-hair. The main
meat of the gameplay is about as generic as it gets: batter goons, shoot goons, pick up ammo, shoot goons, open doors, shoot goons. But in addition you get to grab people by the scruff of their neck and use them as human shields; or crucially, give them a thoroughly good talking to. These moments are tasteless, but they do save the game from its otherwise banal nature.
And, in an artistically credible way, Volition has actually brought the menacing vigilante to life quite convincingly. He's a moody chap driven purely by anger and revenge, and like an ungrateful Frenchman, he's completely merciless. So the fact that you get to use swear words whilst pummelling people's faces into the floor until they nearly poop themselves out of sheer fear is apt. It's just unfortunate that these fitting torture moments don't seem to suit the rest of the game. And it's rather disappointing that, fundamentally, these moments aren't built on particularly rewarding gameplay.
